Or rather, some of you have been voting in our ‘which columns next?’ poll. The current front runner is Stuart Fowkes, which had absolutely nothing to do with him pleading for votes on Twitter, ahem.

All six of Stu’s columns are now scheduled and will pop up over the next few weeks taking us into March. Stu was our resident demo reviewer – this is often a thankless task but at diskant it’s usually preferable to the bombardments of PR-approved crap. At least you sometimes get a nice personalised letter and some sweets.

I’m hoping you’ll all add some comments to the posts and let us know what the folks reviewed are up to these days. Some were successful, some went on to form other awesome bands and others were never heard of again. Oh, and I joined one of them!

Please continue to vote in the poll as I do intend to get everyone’s columns up eventually and you can help decide the order.

Stu is also writing over at The Spider Hill, should you be interested (you should be!).

Update: So… I realized that my sarcastic humor might not be easily detectable via the interwebs. After letting my original post simmer, I decided it was unlike myself and I was actually kind of embarrassed by it. The following is what it should have read all along.

I have been recruited to write for one of the greats. Writing for diskant is going to be a great pleasure and I hope everyone else enjoys it as much as I do. Thanks for Marceline for inviting me over here.

Here’s a quick rundown of Justin Snow related info:
I am married. My wife’s name is Elise. Her family history goes back to Cornwall. Does that get me any UK cred?
I have 2 bunnies (Yoshimi & Hodge). They are lovers. And they are my babies.
I have 1 hedgehog. His name is Acorn and he is very prickly.
I live in Salem, Massachusetts. There are people here that actually consider themselves witches. I am not one of them.
I have a never-ending desire to consume as much music as possible that I hope translates into awesome stuff to read at diskant.

So, that was the end of Dave Stockwell’s columns from the old diskant zine days. I’ve been trying to line up Ross McGivern’s awesome set of columns for months now but he is re-editing them so go shout at him. While we’re waiting, I thought we could do a poll to help me decide the order of schedule for the remaining columnists. VOTE NOW!

Plan B have just launched a digital version of their magazine, so if you can’t find Plan B round your way, have no room for piles of old magazines or just prefer reading stuff on the internets, then this is for you.

It costs £17.50 for unlimited access to a year’s worth of magazines, which you can read, print and download. There’s a free issue up just now to let you see how it works and it looks pretty cool to me, though my broadband provider aready hates me enough without adding to my bandwidth usage.

Have a look HERE.

Musicians have to mature. If for nothing else they have to have “continued professional development” but equally if an act or songwriter continues to regurgitate the same turgid shit year after year it becomes insincere and even worse, boring. Bands that have a career (or yearn/strive for a career) tend to find their formula early (often a variation of someone else’s sound), stick with it and wind becoming stale and boring in the process. This can often carry an act through a long career as the quality of the material gets distracted by hype, personality and whole set of other elements that do not relate to the art therein. This album represents a victory against that kind of complacency and the beauty of evolution.

The two headed monster that is Yonokiero is the enduring partnership that fuelled the fire of Hirameka an indie generation ago and provided many noisy lo-fi moments and dreams rejuvenating a small circle of people and daring to brush up against some big dreams while tussling with real (professional) indie heavyweights.

At this point I have to admit I could never truly be subjective about these guys. I have lived with them, toured with them, argued with them, been sick on them but that is all in the past and with this record I am sufficiently detached and genuinely presented with something I was neither expecting nor recognise. Sure I have been hearing demos of many of these songs for a couple of years now but nothing in this form. I remember their first gig at a house party called the Green Man Roundabout Festival and how thrilling it was to witness the rebirth and reinvention.

The most noticeable transition and addition to their arsenal is the expansion of instruments and sounds. Pleasantly sedate, after all the noise and furore of Hirameka, this is very much their Unplugged In New York (especially on the intro on “Randolph Bourne”), echoing a similar direction that other heroes have taken in evolution with bands such as The Evens.

The highlight tracks amongst the Nick Drake enthused collection include “Hey Now”, one of the older songs on show full of gliding pop with an “About A Girl” feel and Larry Sanders nod in the song title. Conversely in a batch of carefully crafted tunes it is the loudest and heroically lumbering of “Rewound” with its “time for reunion” mantra coupled with beautiful disorientation in its distortion which provides a real bipolar response.

With vocals that are generally hushed in delivery, adding an air of mystery and often menace, it is difficult to decipher what is being said all of the time but for those that are clear the lyrics flow as closely coded and guarded riddles only a spectator next to the trees could fathom, a kind of antidote to the Neil Strauss way of thinking and a different take on making sense of situations. This is the work of a yo yo ego.

It’s not perfection but in a world so cold you have to welcome and support such a rank contender/outsider.

Thesaurus moment: restoration.

Yonokiero
Front And Follow

Ocean Bottom Nightmare (or rather OBN for short) find me on a fortuitous day as I desire something heavier, heavier than heaven, heavier than hell.

Hailing from Nottingham, what we have here are a hardcore snapping three piece leaning more on the metal side of hardcore as opposed to the punk.

Happily citing bands such as Mclusky and Reuben as their inspirations, here is something of an uninspired take on that sound, a sound that lacks a sense of humour that the genre so needs/requires to thrive on. If you really take life so seriously, as this EP title would suggest, soon you’ll adopt some kind of straitjacket as modelled by the latest version of the emo crowd.

On their side is a distorted bass that briefly makes the music breath and stand out but as the stern demeanour of the apparent personality of the band and its music take over and overwhelm such touches, the whole thing is inevitably lost to the ages.

In the end, this music is rock leaning towards the metal tone and taste of Kerrang readers, the music just feels too well adjusted to cause any real ripples in the grand scheme of things and you can shout as much as you like and you just will not be taken seriously. Unless of course you are good looking and goth girls want to fuck you.

Thesaurus moment: Zavvi.

Ocean Bottom Nightmare
Phat Phidelity

It has certainly been a while, but I have finally gotten around to adding not one, but TWO new interviews for your reading pleasure.

– First up, our man about Leeds – Pascal – got hold of Zach Hill after a recent solo show and probed him about drumming techniques and what’s up with Hella. He even recorded a bit of the show on video for you. He’s nice like that. Go read >>

– All us zine writers have a bunch of unpublished interviews gathering dust somewhere. I have a very lengthy one with The Bluetones. Luckily for you, that’s not what we’re publishing, but instead an interview by JGRAM with Glasgow’s Dead or American who recently launched their new album with the help of our own Souvaris. diskant: it’s like LOST – we’re all connected in so many ways. Go read >>

Have you got any interviews languishing in your archives? Maybe we’d like to read them – get in touch!

It must be great to be in PR. Think of a story related to what your clients do, think of a shocking-sounding number, cook up a survey (the fewer people you ask the better) and email it the newspapers., watch the publicity role in and laugh on the way to the bank.

Do reporters not even think about the plausibility of what they write? “One third of Glaswegians a victim of card fraud last year!!1!!”

One third, eh? So that can’t be the kids and under 18s — a quarter of the population? The folk who can’t get a card because of bad credit – round here that’s got to be about 10%. Those that haven’t got cards worth ripping off? Another 20%. So that must mean that everyone else has been ripped off!!

31% of people ripped off by thieves last year compared to just 26% across the UK as a whole.

The upturn in card fraud is believed to be a knock-on effect of the credit crunch,

Funnily enough, this survey was commissioned by a company that sells credit card protection insurance…

See also the police claiming that there’s been a credit crunch-induced rise in shoplifting because, er there was more shoplifting in December last year than there was in April. Hmm, what happens in December that’s different from April. Has to do with shops… No, you’ve got me.

(Originally posted January 2005)

Records that were good in 2004

That time of year has wound around again, and everyone who’s got an opportunity to make themselves heard (and this being t’internet, that means a lot of people) has compiled inevitable endless lists of what they liked about the previous 12 months. You may have noticed that diskant towers itself plays host to such humdrum marvels – though I have to be a back-slapping sonuvabitch and say that I’ve always enjoyed reading our lists and bolshy arguments far more than yer average boring coolometer measurements on all those other boring sites…

Annnnnyway, it was when I started thinking about what candidates I would be putting forward as my nominees for the diskant team top few musical recordings of the year that it slowly dawned on me: there’s only the tiniest chance that more than a couple of my favourite records of 2004 would receive a single vote from anyone else. Why do I know this? Because I’m a fucking obscurist cuntbag. As mentioned in the last time I shat one of these incubi out I’ve developed a worrying affection for/interest in tiny CDR labels dealing in obscurer-than-thou artists and miniscule print runs (you know Davenport have got a tape coming out in an edition of 11? Bastards!). So, is this gross arrogance and patronising behaviour on the most disgusting scale? Fuck knows. But honestly, there’s no posturing here: the records I’m going to blather about are genuinely far more interesting and exciting to me than pretty much any of the ‘properly’ released records you’ll find us arguing over in our annual records round-up. As the mainstream “industry” stagnates, and independents are increasingly either swallowed up or bankrupted, why shouldn’t music released on CDR format be considered ‘valid’ or ‘proper’? I’m not directing this at you, good reader, for I am sure you are pure of heart and clear of head, but alas others are more ignorant and prejudiced, whether they realise it or not. Obviously, this argument also dates back to tape labels, but with no discernable quality difference between a ‘proper’ CD that was produced by the thousand in a pressing plant and a ‘homemade’ CDR that was burnt at home, the case for considering all this music is ever more pressing. Whatever.

“C’mon Dave,” you might want to say to me, “could you not at least talk about how great the latest Sonic Youth LP is?”

“NO!” I would knock back like a cancer-ridden Bill Hicks preaching to the unconverted, “It’s a disgraceful half-asleep assortment of soft-rock songs knocked out between too many arty side-projects, and it’s the worst fucking thing they’ve done in years!”

“…”

Honestly, that’s my genuine opinion. 2004 was the year I fell out with the Youth. It’s pretty sad really. Almost made me cry.

Ahem. Anyway. Now with you suitably hushed (and no doubt wondering exactly what kind of delusion I am suffering from this year), please allow me to begin detailing precisely why I’d choose a bunch of no-budget recorded-in-a-shed lowlifes over a particularly turgid offering by a band that (admittedly after 20-odd years of being mostly incredible) sound like they’re lost the central idea about why music is such a beautiful thing to get excited about in the first places.

Continue reading »

Of all the folk associated with diskant, I must be the one who knows least about aesthetics, design, all that stuff. But even I‘ve heard of Designers’ Republic.
They’ve gone bust. Just flagging it up, if anyone wise wants to chip in…